The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds

  Had been incorporate. So we grew together,

  Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

  But yet an union in partition,

  Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;

  So with two seeming bodies, but one heart …

  Amazing: there’s that “witty partition” again: the one between the sentient “double cherries.” But the double-cherry division—another “wall”—when looked at as closely as Booth asks us to, turns out to be another kind of partition. A partition that partakes of union, of communion in partition, of the pleasures Wordsworth refers to, the almost sexual pleasure one takes in similitude and dissimilitude, one-ness and two-ness. Two be and not two be.

  To help us as he launched into his reading of the double-cherry passage Booth had handed out a two-sided, dark-cherry-colored, nearly purple sheet of paper with the passage and his notations on it.

  When Booth sent me a copy of the paper, he included his reading of the double-cherry passage typographically entwined with his ecstatic annotation, one might say, and I realized that what I was looking at was a kind of musical score. Booth had turned the passage into a Mozartian score entwining his own voice with Shakespeare. Critic and poet like a double cherry on one stem.

  I loved reading Booth’s annotated version of the passage with its white-on-black bracketed highlighting. And one of the first things that leapt out at me, the strenuous impertinence to beat all strenuous impertinence, the conspicuous irrelevance to beat all conspicuous irrelevance, was that line, line 203, where Helena begins to unfold her schoolgirl memories:

  We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,

  Have with our needles created both one flower …

  Artificial gods? Surely, Shakespeare is not merely speaking of schoolgirls doing needlework patterns when he puts this lofty notion in Helena’s words.

  Artificial gods? Again, this is one of the passages in which Shakespeare the writer seems to be cruising along working up some schoolgirl memories and suddenly drifts into a meditation on art itself as a kind of godlike, if artificial, creation, an abiding preoccupation in more explicit passages.

  But this is not the limit of the artificial godhood invoked. Looking at Booth’s annotation one’s attention is focused on the strange, strenuous leap from the mundane to the mythological and the theological. It’s a young girl describing her prepubescent friendship but in terms that are almost shocking in the ferocity of their coming together:

  As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds

  Had been incorporate. So we grew together,

  Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

  But yet an union in partition …

  That double-cherry image: it’s a half-formed embryonic twin, it carries suggestion of sweet communion, but also Siamese-twin monstrousness, of a beautiful unified identity and yet a confusion of parts. Concord in discord? Discord in concord? Both/and?

  It invokes all the Ovidian metamorphic stories in which, for instance, Daphne is turned into a tree to escape rape by Apollo. But here the metamorphic union is not one forced by fear but formed by some sublime form of love that only “artificial gods” can create and achieve.

  Booth has found a passage that one could easily pass by and made us look at something rich and strange: something that seems to link birth, sexuality and creativity with the dramatist as artificial god who embroiders the fates of his characters in the needlepoint of his pen and ink. (A very similar figure linking needlepoint and writing appears in Pericles: Marina “would with sharp needle wound/The cambric, which she made more sound by hurting it.” She makes holes into a whole.) And links creativity to sexuality—or at least the Wordsworthian sexual pleasure the mind takes in similitude and dissimilitude.

  In other words an absolutely bottomless meditation on human creativity, natural creation, sex and drama subverts or disrupts the ostensible insipid purpose of the passage. Strenuous impertinence! Conspicuous irrelevance! They are a double cherry themselves.

  Would I have noticed this in a lifetime of reading and seeing the Dream if Stephen Booth had not annotated it in his Mozartian score of the double-cherry passage? Perhaps, but I doubt I would have glimpsed its depths without Booth’s prompting. It’s what he does better and with greater grace and restraint than other close readers. It’s one more instance of why I find myself grateful for his Isaac Stern–like reading and playing skill. Why he’s the un-Bloom.

  A double cherry of course is also another Shakespearean meditation on twinship, imperfectly divided, identical and yet with separate identities. Booth seems to sense, and one senses it in Booth’s attention to it, that in the double-cherry passage, in the double-cherry image, we are very close to some primal root of Shakespeare’s vision, one that might—if one were to give in to the temptation of biographical speculation—be traceable to his own primal experience of twinship, the birth of his male and female twins, Hamnet and Judith, when he was just twenty-one. If so, it transcends biographical fact to become what Wallace Stevens called “supreme fiction.”

  And then Booth concludes his amazing ten-minute talk on “the witty partition” with a paragraph that is purely Boothian, one in which he finds, in an apparently casual obscenity, the relationship between “hole” and “whole”—the nothingness and the infinitude Peter Brook had spoken of:

  “The electricity built up in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by interplay of ideas relative to the word ‘part’ is so strong that I am tempted to suggest—although ultimately I am just prudent enough not to suggest—that Wall as partition and the syllable ‘whole’ (as opposed to a part) flickers behind Thisby’s cheerfully obscene ‘I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.’ ”

  “Hole”/“whole”: they are like a double cherry themselves.

  EMPSON: QUANTUM AND CORNSTARCH

  But now let us pause, here in the Blue Ridge foothills, where it will be recalled Booth was disclosing all this in an astonishingly compressed ten minutes on the Blackfriars stage. Pause for a moment of intellectual history that might help place Booth in the twentieth-century tradition of close reading and its evolution to “reader reception.”

  It’s an evolution that might better be put in perspective by Booth’s response to another gaffe I made in conversation with him. A well-meaning gaffe, to be sure, but one that elicited an unexpectedly revealing reply.

  Since I was such an admirer of William Empson’s collected Essays on Shakespeare, and of the critical method Empson embodied in Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words, I made the mistake of asking Booth during a break in the conference how much Empson had been an influence on his own approach. Why this turned out to be a gaffe will become apparent in a moment. But first, for those unfamiliar with Empson, perhaps the best, most novel recent way of explaining the virtual revolution Empson created in literary studies in the twentieth century is the comparison the British Shakespearean Jonathan Bate (author of The Genius of Shakespeare) made between Empson’s vision of literary ambiguity and the contemporaneous vision of Cambridge quantum physicists of uncertainty in particle and wave theory.

  It is ironic, and perhaps not accidental, Bate suggested in The Genius of Shakespeare, that William Empson developed his approach to Shakespeare, to literature in general, in the 1920s and ’30s, at the same time the Cambridge physicists were working out the paradoxical, ambiguous implications of quantum theory. Both intellectual movements partook, Bate suggested, of a new version of ambiguity: not the usual “either/or ambiguity” but “both/and ambiguity.”

  I thought it was one of the most illuminating conjectures on intellectual history I’d come across. In physics, the Cambridge adepts who then included Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac and other disciples of the Copenhagen school of Niels Bohr, were wrestling with the troubling paradoxical discovery that the phenomenon of the quantum they all believed in, the infinitesimal discrete unit of energy, could appear
at times as both a particle and a wave depending on when it was measured (to oversimplify a lot). Should the quantum be called a particle, or a wave? No, the Cambridge physicists said, not either/or. Rather, both/and: both particle and wave. Bate touches more lightly on the uncertainty principle (aware of the temptation to make overreaching metaphors from mathematics) which in some versions postulated that in certain circumstances a quantum—an electron circling an atom for instance—has no definable, absolutely determinable position but rather just exists as a cloud of probabilities, a haze of uncertainty about where it might actually be. Like the shifting meanings of a word in shifting contexts. Like Lear’s actual dimensions obscured in a cloud of cornstarch.

  Looking back over the history of Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare scholarship, it’s possible to see just how important a figure Empson was. Until Empson, so much of Shakespeare criticism was glorification of Shakespeare, about his “greatness” and the greatness of his characters. It was about how he told us everything we needed to know about human nature and human character. About the fine sentiments, the exemplary lessons, embodied in his plays which so faithfully reflected human emotions and universal truths and morality. Up until Empson, Shakespeare was celebrated in “the external beauty of holiness,” as the Anglican church formulation has it, a line used in defending the spirituality of beautiful cathedrals.

  Up until Empson, Shakespearean criticism was in effect much like Newtonian mechanics. It revealed grand truths about the proper order of a stable universe, and the emotional constellations within us. Before quantum theory opened up the strange world of subatomic particles not dreamed of before, where familiar concepts like causality and determinism no longer prevailed.

  Similarly Empson might be said to have taken us beneath the Newtonian level of Shakespeare’s themes and characters and sentiments and messages to some destabilizing subatomic level within the language, where strange charms prevailed, the kind of rich and strange charms that are, more than any lofty sententiousness, what defines what is most uniquely Shakespearean. The advent of Theory put Empsonian close reading in eclipse, but it’s a heartening, hopeful development that, in some quarters at least, Empson’s reputation, his contribution, is receiving renewed recognition. There were always those who continued to value his readings. When I visited the brilliant critic Christopher Ricks in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home there was a picture of Empson on the wall of his sitting room where we talked. Ricks along with Booth is one of the most illuminating contemporary practitioners of Empsonian close reading.

  For a long time, though, Empson was spoken of mainly in terms of his eccentricities: the unusual Mandarin-style neck-beard he grew while teaching literature in China during World War II. I’ve spoken of his obsessive, scorching hostility to Christian doctrine, most particularly the “Doctrine of Satisfaction” (which gives the lie to one of the chief critiques of Empson-derived “New Criticism”—that it was somehow a Christianizing movement with all that searching for Christ-symbols and the like).

  But most of all you heard the naughty anecdotes. One Cambridge graduate of the sixties told me he heard that the reason Empson was expelled from Cambridge was that his “bedder” (the now obsolete term for a servant who made up student rooms) found a copious quantity of condoms in Empson’s bedroom. Another anecdote had Empson, upon his return to the United Kingdom after the war, setting up unorthodox housekeeping in which he slept in a tent in his living room. Is this, as they say, “too much information”? Perhaps, but Empson is a great character and these anecdotes, curiously, conjure up an actual engagement with the forms and varieties of pleasure, which are at the heart of Empsonian and Boothian close reading.

  I recall being surprised and pleased to discover at a Shakespeare Association of America scholarly convocation in April 2000 a “paper session” devoted to Empson along with two other exceptional literary figures who’d written on Shakespeare: T. S. Eliot and Oscar Wilde. The session was entitled ironically (I think) “Before Theory”—as if Theory were somehow the great divide between the nonprofessional, unscientific if nonetheless occasionally artful criticism that came before it, and the purportedly great theoretical achievements of Derrida, DeMan and Foucault that followed after.

  Nonetheless I celebrated this appreciation of Empson in a New York Times Book Review essay, as a hopeful harbinger of a return from Theory to close reading in the academy. I may have been too optimistic about the larger trend but I think there’s no doubt that Bate, for instance, has been successful in reviving interest in Empson. And it is my fond hope to help in a small way to do for Stephen Booth what Bate did for Empson.

  There are differences, of course.

  Booth is not Empson, or—as he says in his cryptically ambiguous, loving-and-chiding way—“Empson was the only human being who didn’t have the advantage of reading Empson.” Not quite true, unless he’s portraying Empson the way Ben Jonson portrayed Shakespeare: as someone who raced through first drafts and never glanced back to reread or revise. (Empson sometimes could seem to write with irascible haste.)

  Rather Booth’s critique of Empson has to do with Empson not being Empsonian enough: rather than unfolding multiple simultaneous explanations—a haze of possible meanings like the haze of possible positions of a particle—around a word or phrase, Empson often (too often in Booth’s view) unfolded the possibilities only to collapse them to a singularity (as Shakespeare calls it in Twelfth Night: “the trick of singularity”). Because Empson—“not having the advantage of having read Empson”—thinks he knows the one, singularly correct, interpretation.

  But even if Empson were Empson to Booth’s specifications, Booth goes beyond Empson or takes Empson to a different level, one might say.

  While Empson unfolds the ambiguities, sometimes not merely seven types but seven versions of each type, they are nonetheless an almost pictorial array, beautiful but static. Booth’s “ideational static” is dynamic, one might say. Not stasis, but rather composed of interacting patterns of interference (or inference). What Booth seems to sense is the pulsating, flickering, mutually subverting relationships between the ambiguities. A dynamic, dyadic alternating current of connections between them, shades of meaning, fluctuations of coloration like the foliage leaves flipping their varying colors back and forth. Empson gone electric.

  “Flickering,” “pulsating,” “vacillating”—these words come up often in Booth’s criticism.

  Boothian ambiguity is then exponentially more complex, a quantum leap more complex than Empson’s both/and. Not a contradiction but an enhancement of Empson at his best, less crankily reductive. Booth, it could be said, puts Empson’s ambiguities in motion, sees the Sonnets for instance as perpetual motion machines.

  In Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and his Yale edition with its four hundred pages of footnotes and commentary one sees how the pulsating ambiguity and the pleasures it offers are what attracts Booth to the Sonnets. Boothian ambiguity flirts with the possibility of endless, bottomless polysemy; it gestures at the Sonnets as endless echo chambers of combinations and permutations of possibilities; dizzying, even threatening, holes in the world.

  It is one of the critiques of Booth’s approach that he sometimes does seem to go too far toward suggesting an infinitude of abundance in the fourteen-line humming machines of pleasure that are the Sonnets. Booth’s multiplicity may seem “inexhaustible,” but it is not as if anything goes, but many things go, many more than we can imagine, perhaps many more than we can exhaust in a lifetime.

  And then, with all that in play Booth compounds the complexity by introducing a second player, in addition to the sonneteer—the reader—and focusing on the experience of reading or seeing Shakespeare. Here he joins two of his contemporaries, brilliant close readers Harry Berger Jr. and Stanley Fish (before Fish became a postmodernist contrarian), in shifting from close reading of the poem to close reading of the reader, of reading itself. I remember being seduced in college by Berger’s reading of the “bir
th of Venus” passage in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which Berger, in effect, contends the passage is really about the reader experiencing the “birth of Venus,” i.e., lust, while reading about the birth of Venus.

  And then there was Stanley Fish, before he became a crusading relativist, in his brilliant book on Milton, Surpris’d by Sin. In which Fish makes the surprisingly persuasive case that it is Milton’s recurrent ploy in his poem to seduce the reader into an appreciation of beauty, particularly of landscape, flesh and classical literary allusions, and then to shame the reader for having succumbed—for having fallen into a trap, or trapdoor, just as Adam and Eve fell. Seduced by Satan’s promise of knowledge and beauty: surprised by sin.

  What I didn’t realize, what will make this sound like a gaffe to those in the know, those who possess Booth’s hard-to-find Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is that Booth made his initial reputation as a scholar in that book with a fairly scathing critique of Empson’s famous interpretation of Sonnet 94. I know, you didn’t see it on the front pages of the tabs; it barely registered in the literary quarterlies, but in certain circles, which, alas, did not include me, this was big news.

  In any case, it was something I only learned later when I got my hands on the elusive book, and so I thought I was complimenting Booth when I brought up Empson. We were having coffee and doughnuts one morning on the mezzanine level of the Blackfriars Playhouse between a couple of the ten-minute scholarly paper sessions and I asked him if he thought himself in a way an avatar of the Empsonian tradition.

  “Well, I read and would very much admire Empson if only Empson would read Empson.”

  I thought I caught on to what he was suggesting, knowing how peremptory Empson could be in his judgment about things.

  “You’re saying that Empson says he’s all for ambiguity but in fact he thinks he knows the one true or truer meaning.”

  Booth nodded assent.